my mirror knows best.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?
Have you ever been told that the longer you stare into a mirror, the more likely you are to hallucinate and see apparitions of strange faces? Faces that are no longer yours and deformities that build caricatures out of your deepest insecurities? In the mirror, you will never see yourself as others see you, so what’s shown is just a reflection of an identity separate from who you actually are.
Even though the person I see in the mirror isn’t who I truly am, this reflection is still my most trustworthy companion wherever I go. My mirror is a vessel to a version of myself where I bare everything out in the open — with which comes my most interesting conversations. Though it has echolalia where every expression, every word, and every stressed syllable is repeated back, it picks up on cues that the people around me could never discern. From the fine lines on my forehead when I raise my eyebrows to split-second twitching in my eyes, my mirror is a distortion that tells me what I wish to hear, but shows me what I wish not to see.
It has become a place of contemplation. A place where I not only make the most inconsequential decisions, from what earrings I should wear to dinner to ruling out acting in soap-operas as a viable career, but also a place where the person I see debates against the person I am. Every glance pushes me to dwell on what is reflected back, because when I look into the mirror I see not in whole, but in parts that make a whole.
Among the parts I see, the most striking are my dark circles and eye bags that tell stories strong enough to be passed down as folklore. They are testaments to the sleepless nights I’ve spent preparing for examinations months in advance, an ode to the refusal of my body to cope with the hours spent staring into a laptop screen. However, my mirror does not agree, it never sees dedication, only exhaustion. It never recognises it as evidence of my passion, it only perceives a consequence of overwork.
When asked what my most compelling conversation is, this is the most interesting disagreement I still continue to argue; it is when I look into the mirror and ask myself, “is what I see worth the hassle? Is what is shown, what I am working to become?” While I believe it is, I still have to convince my mirror that.
